Celebrating a legend’s century.

On a far August 25th 1911 came out of a simple farmer’s daughter’s womb, announced to the world by that usual cry just like billions of new born children before him, and billions after him will perform the same loud cry that every parent awaits anxiously. But no one in the world, especially those surrounding that humble bed smiling and congratulating the poor couple for the arrival of the “Boy”, could tell that He will become the only man who defeated and humiliated the mighty war machine of the United States of America.

“Vo Nguyen GIAP” was born. In the years to come he will be known simply as “General Giap”. The little General who launched the “Tet” offensive that night in January 30^th 1968, marking the lunar new year. The famous offensive by which the North Vietnamese army deployed 70 thousand soldiers in one of the most courageously daring simultaneous attack over tens of American and South Vietnamese positions.

The Viet-Cong guerrillas, acting in concert, attacked the American embassy in Saigon where they arrived by public busses and taxis. That day the entire world understood that America lost the war, even though it won that single battle. American youngsters started burning the call-up cards, TV reported the precipitating bad situation right from the front and things are really going bad, thousands of flagged coffins return home every week, Barry MacGuire sang “Eve Of Destruction”, and Jane Fonda saluted with the closed fist from Hanoi.

The little general became not only a legend, but as well a model for all revolutionaries. Ernesto “CHE” Guevara became infatuated and left Cuba to “create another Vietnam”, but he got killed in the Bolivian stone quarries. “Il Che” was fascinated by the Vietnamese idea of the “Armed Propaganda”, the creation of “Liberated Zones”, practicing the “Insurrection” and the complete “Fusion” binding the “People” together with the “Revolutionary Army”.

In 1966, Israeli General Moshe Dayan went to Vietnam to observe first hand the, by then famous, “People’s War” which he admired, and which served him next year in the “Six Days War”.

Then came the turn of the Argentinean, Brazilian and Uruguayan guerrillas to try and imitate the “Giap Model” but were all defeated. Instead “He” really won. On the morning of April 1975, his armed forces entered Saigon on tanks, while the American Embassy personnel were rushing to seize and grasp to the skates of a helicopter in a desperate trial to escape the inevitable out of the burning hell of that day.

In the second floor of the massive military hospital number 108 reigning over Tran Hung Dao street in Hanoi, where a machine blows oxygen into his lungs for six hours a day, lives now the “Legendary Small General”, hero of several victorious wars against France, Japan and the United States of America.

Based on Enrico Deaglio’s comment in the weekly Italian “Il Venerdì” #1231 of October 21^st 2011.

P.S: The entire world celebrated him, and every respectable military academy is teaching his “Model”. The experts of “Nato Technical Assistance Programme”, in simple words the CIA operatives, armed and trained the Libyan insurgents on tactics inspired by the very same “Model”.

But generally in the Arab World especially in Egypt, how many pseudo-expert, shelling us every day from TV screens with nonsense, do know the man or even mentioned him to a starving generation hungry for concrete, not plastic nor wax or paper, “Models”?